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Reproductions Supplied by EDRS Are the Best That Can Be Made from the Original Document DOCUMENT RESUME ED 473 790 CS 511 775 TITLE Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (85th, Miami, Florida, August 5-8, 2002). Science Communication Interest Group Division. PUB DATE 2002-08-00 NOTE 203p.; For other sections of these proceedings, see CS 511 769-787. PUB TYPE Collected Works Proceedings (021) Reports Research (143) EDRS PRICE EDRS Price MF01/PC09 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Book Reviews; Climate Change; Content Analysis; Credibility; Electronic Mail; Global Warming; Higher Education; Information Sources; Interviews; *Journalism Education; Meteorology; Periodicals; *Scientific and Technical Information IDENTIFIERS Appalachia; *Environmental Reporting; Environmental Risk Assessment; News Sources; Nixon (Richard M); Rhetorical Strategies ABSTRACT The Science Communication Interest Group Division of the proceedings contains the following 7 papers: "Forecasting the Future: How Television Weathercasters' Attitudes and Beliefs about Climate Change Affect Their Cognitive Knowledge on the Science" (Kris Wilson); "The Web and E-Mail in Science Communication: Results of In-Depth Interviews" (Rebecca Dumlao and Shearlean Duke); "Book Reviewers' Recognition of Environmental Ethics in Aldo Leopold's 'A Sand County Almanac'" (James F. Carstens); "Environmental Threats, Information Sources and Optimistic Bias: Environmental Risk in Appalachia" (Daniel Riffe and Jan Knight); "Context in Print and Online Environmental Articles" (Ryan Randazzo and Jennifer Greer); "Framing the Environmental Agenda: A Qualitative Comparison of 1970 Nixon Speeches and 'Time' Magazine" (Diana Knott); and "Source Credibility and Global Warming: A Content Analysis of Environmental Groups" (Terence (Terry) Flynn).(RS) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (85th, Miami, FL, August 5-8, 2002: Science Communication Interest Group Division. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY iq (GI' 11 TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 1 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 1:1 This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. 1:1 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI positior. or policy. BEST COPY AVAILABLE Forecasting the Future: How Television Weathercasters' Attitudes and Beliefs about Climate Change Affect Their Cognitive Knowledge on the Science 734(13--- Abstract The topic of climate change has recently resurfaced on many news agendas, but increasingly the scientific and political issues niix. Previous research has noted that even though the public relies primarily on television news as a source of climate change information,broadcasting has few environment and/or science reporters to cover the topic.This study considers another potential source--television weathercasters. This research measures weathercasters' acquired climate change knowledge against the scientific consensus and analyzes differences in their knowledge based on several factors that may influence their climate change reporting. Results show that the TV weathercasters with the most accurate climate change knowledge scored highest in the affective domain--that is, the attitudes and values they hold about this scientific concept influenced their cognitive understanding of the topic more than any other independent variable. Put more simply----the "politics" of what some consider a controversial scientific topic had the greatest bearing on weathercasters' scientific knowledge. Forecasting the Future: How Television Weathercasters' Attitudes and Beliefs about Climate Change Affect Their Cognitive Knowledge on the Science Creating Scientific Consensus While media coverage of global warming didn't really begin until 1988, the research on the science of increased greenhouse gases in our atmosphere dates all the way back to the 19th century. As industrialization was sweeping across the Northern Hemisphere, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist from Sweden first hypothesized about the impacts of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (Arrenhius, 1896). His research estimated a global temperature increase of 4-6°C would result from a doubling of industrial emissions. While the technological tools have become more sophisticated and the temperature estimate has been refined over the last 100 plus years, thebasic science has remained the same. Climate modeling got an inadvertent boost in the 1950s Cold War era out of fears that the Soviet Union was modifying global climate (Victor, 1995). In 1965, the President's Science Advisory Committee published the first government report to recognize that climate change could be caused by human activities and that this would have important consequences for the world (PSAC, 1965). Two yearslater, a numerical model of the atmosphere predicted that doubled carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere should raise the average surface temperature of Earth 1.5°C-3°C (Manabe and Weatherald,1967). More than 100 independent estimates of average surface temperature were made between the mid 1960's and the mid 1980's and all predicted temperate increases within the range of 1.5°C to 4.5°C with a doubling of greenhouse gases (Schlesinger and Mitchell, 1985). Since then, Forecasting the Future multiple model enhancements and three international panels comprised of thousands of leading scientists have concluded much the same. The third report of the IntergovernMental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2001) projects that globally averaged surface temperatures will rise 1.4 to 5.8°C this century. While the low end of the predicted temperature increase has remained largely the same throughout the advances and changes in modeling, the high end has gone through several modifications, with this new estimate of 5.8°C being higher than in the two previous IPCC reports. Initially the press was not very interested in the atmospheric research on a doubling of carbon dioxide (Kellogg, 1988)that took the serendipitous confluence of extreme weather events, combined with the release of new data, to take the theory of global warming from the laboratories and science journals and thrust it onto the media agenda. The climate of Earth has always fluctuated, so the task of separating the "signal" of anthropogenic warming amid the "noise" of the natural variability is extremely complex. Scientists around the globe are using large computers and esoteric programming to tryand model both the current and predicted climate of the future. These general circulation Models (GCMs) are three-dimensional representations of the atmosphere that involve hundreds of thousands of separate equations (MacDonald, 1989). Although the models do show consistency with respect to increasing global temperatures, cloud coverand precipitation, regional predictions remain problematic because of the large grid size usedin the GCM's. The IPCC was formed by the United Nations to synthesize scientific consensus. The principal finding in its report was that a "discernable global warming hasoccurred and it may be due to anthropogenic causes" (IPCC, 1995). The second reportconsidered regional analyses of climate trends, future climate scenarios and the impact for human and natural systems and was comprised of more biologists and geologists (IPCC, 1998). The third assessment included more than 1200 multi-national scientists from 23 science disciplines that produced three separate working group documents, each morethan 2 5 Forecasting the Future 1,000 pages. In addition to considering "improved analysis of data sets and comparisons among data from different sources that have led to a greaterunderstanding of climate change," (IPCC, 2001) more emphasis was also placed on the social aspects of potential climate change. Scientists were told to be "policy-relevant not policy- prescriptive" in their report. In other words they were encouraged not to tell policymakers what to do about potential climate change, but rather to provide "likely" scenarios in lay language that they can understand and assimilate. While the ersatz separationof the science from the politics sounds like good practice, research, including results from this study, suggests that this is difficult with this highly charged topic. And some scientists charge the IPCC itself with being "too political" (Lindzen, 2001). The IPCC reports represent scientific consensus, a term that creates confusion among scientists themselves, let alone journalists coveringthem. Scientists often accuse journalists of making science more certain than it is by eliminating important caveats, but the limited research to date suggests that journalists often also make science seem far less certain, often out of ignorance (Stocking, 1999). Some aspects of climate change science are considered certainties: The theory of the greenhouseeffect itself is the most well- established certainty in all of atmospheric science (Kellogg, 1991) and is not debated, although the large majority of weathercasters in this survey believed it still was. Dramatic increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, including a 31% increase in carbon dioxide since 1750 (IPCC, 2001) are also considered certain science. The next level of
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